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Since its inception, the Internet has been a bit of a free for all. Smut, racism, terrorist training -- it's all available at the click of a mouse. Also free for the taking is all the music and video you can stuff on a hard drive. Well, streaming-video kingpin Rob Glaser, who gave us access to so much of this copyrighted material, now wants to take it all back. He proposed a new standard that would protect movies and music, forcing us to pay for the privilege of taking four hours to download and burn a CD or watch jerky, horrible low-res video. Thanks, but I'll stick with the real thing -- taping movies on TV and borrowing my friends' CDs and never giving them back.

In related news, Napster tried to get the courts to overturn the ruling that forced the Web site to remove all copyrighted material. The judge, obviously not a ripping freak, said no.

Light at the End of the Linux Tunnel

Red Hat has had more ups and downs than a Sydney-to-Hobart sailboat. Now it is on an upswing, having earned the noble distinction of actually making money off of free software. The firm just announced a profit of $600,000. Imagine how much it could make if it actually charged for its operating systems!

Meanwhile Linux keeps on a rollin', at least in the servers market. Ten percent of new servers now come equipped with Linux, and many users, it seems, are tearing out existing OSes and installing open source. As much as 27 percent of today's servers currently run Linux. Now if it could only get its desktop act together.

Not all Linux vendors are so fortunate. LynuxWorks hoped to raise a cool $70 mil in an IPO. The current gruesome market conditions put the kibosh on those plans.

Compaq Clones Another Idea

Compaq rose to fame and fortune by copying the work of others, namely by cloning the IBM PC and sticking it into an ugly tan suitcase. Now the company appears to be poised to steal another Big Blue stroke of genius. Compaq will reorganize to focus on services rather than just hardware.

Exodus Shareholders Race for the Exits

I'm sure when ISP Exodus thought up its name, it was imagining a great and successful journey ahead for itself. But instead of fleeing Egypt, Exodus shareholders are running pell-mell away from the stock. After a warning of some pretty brutal earnings, the stock plummeted 30 percent. This is in the wake of previous plunges. The stock is worth about two bucks a share now -- less than a Whopper with Cheese. Last Fall it was hovering around seventy bucks.